Yesterday (22 Nov) the Department for Work and Pensions published Impacts and Costs and Benefits of the Future Jobs Fund (PDF 86pp), a quantitative evaluation of the last government’s most important job-creation scheme.
This is the programme the government cancelled because it was “ineffective” [Press Notice May 2010]. Earlier this year, Iain Duncan Smith said:
Under the future jobs fund and everything else that was going on under the previous Government they threw money at providers ahead of any kind of outcome, caring only to tick the boxes to say that they had done something rather than that they had done something reasonable.
So it must be embarrassing that this review found that the Future Jobs Fund decreased the amount of time participants spent on benefits and increased the time they spent in unsubsidised employment. Two years after they started their FJF job, participants were 16 per cent less likely to be on benefits than if they had not taken part and 27 per cent more likely to be in unsubsidised employment and …
the impacts of FJF on both welfare receipt and unsubsidised employment were still strong after 104 weeks, so it is reasonable to assume that they will be sustained for some time beyond the 104-week outcome period.
The cost-benefit analysis is particularly impressive:
- net benefit to participants, about £4,000 per participant;
- net benefit to employers, about £6,850 per participant;
- net cost to the Exchequer, about £3,100 per participant; and
- net benefit to society, about £7,750 per participant.
Sometimes the news is just too good for the DWP.
Hazel’s comment:
What bothers me more about this than the obvious political implications is the fact that a policy review paper has been published in the DWP’s statistics series without a reference number and with no ISBN.
The librarian in me is a very unhappy bunny.
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